Exploring the role
of academic research

What are academic researchers for?

Hilary Sutcliffe

4 Jan 2017

We are helping a University and some academic researchers explore how their areas of work make a greater contribution to society. We began to narrow the focus to consider how they can work ‘for’ the particular areas of society they serve, than just their work being ‘about’ them - actively contributing rather than only dispassionately observing.

Here are my starting points, and thanks to Helen Pallett and Roland Jackson on twitter for contributing to this list and Duncan Green from Oxfam for his enjoyable blogs on why academics can help NGOs.

Perhaps an academic can contribute to society through:

Dispassionately observing phenomena?

Providing an independent or impartial view?

Delivering rigorous evidence?

Providing space for others to reflect on key issues?

Questioning things taken for granted?

Challenging assumptions?

Creating new technologies, products, services or systems?

Developing new ways of thinking or working?

Providing access to funding for important work with others?

Helping us understand ourselves better?

Helping shed light on how different perspectives or ways of thinking can help us as individuals or organisations more effective?

These are not all comparable, some are values others might be actions, but they have provided real food for thought for the researchers and a useful starting point for discussions about Responsible Innovation and Universities.

COMMENTS

From University of Nottingham Academic Prof Brigitte Nerlich

As comments on twitter quickly vanish… I once wrote something about scholarship, or rather reported on older research into the value of scholarship which might be of interest. And just replace scholarship by ‘academic research’ and ‘scholar’ by academic, if scholarship seems to old fashioned a word.

“Ernest Leroy Boyer (1928 – 1995) was an American educator who served as Commissioner of Education. Throughout his life he fostered reforms in teaching and education and closer relationship between teaching and research. In this process he also redefined the concept of ‘scholarship’. Boyer “proposed that ‘scholarship’ should be seen as covering four types of activity within a modern and engaged university:

The scholarship of discovery that includes original research that advances knowledge;

The scholarship of integration that involves synthesis of information across disciplines, across topics within a discipline, or across time;

The scholarship of application (also later called the scholarship of engagement) that goes beyond the service duties of a faculty member to those within or outside the University and involves the rigor and application of disciplinary expertise with results that can be shared with and/or evaluated by peers; and

The scholarship of teaching and learning that the systematic study of teaching and learning processes. It differs from scholarly teaching in that it requires a format that will allow public sharing and the opportunity for application and evaluation by others.” (emphasis added)

This model of ‘scholarship’ gives equal weight to the creation of knowledge, the integration of knowledge and the making sense of knowledge in context(s), the making use of knowledge in the wider world, with the wider world and for the wider world, and the interaction and transformation of knowledge through collaborative teaching and learning.

The first and second types of scholarship can be said to ‘make public knowledge’ and the third and forth to ‘make knowledge public’. Both these wider activities are interrelated and can’t be carried out in isolation. There is however a tendency to pull these activities apart in the context of reorganising the (public) funding of teaching and research both in the US and the UK.”

CheersBrigitte

From Director of the Risk Innovation Lab at ASU Prof Andrew Maynard:

Ah, a nice provocative question for a Sunday morning :)

There are, of course, plenty of well-worn answers to the question that can be parroted off (usually starting with the “self-evident” truth that academics are essential, then back-filling the “why” and “how”), but it’s a surprisingly tough question to answer with reflection and honesty.

I typically think of my roles and my responsibilities as an academic as a generator and conveyor of knowledge and insights that have value to society (or more specific, parts of society) by enriching lives (opening up ways of seeing and understanding self, community and the world more generally that are life-enhancing), informing (providing information and insights that helps people make decisions and create “value” for themselves and their community), and educating (providing people with specific knowledge and expertise that they can use effectively).

These roles may sound very one-way, but I also think they come with a great responsibility to listen to, engage with and learn from social constituents, so you (I) as an academic become a responsible partner within society who is contributing to social well-being and growth. I guess tis is part of the largely unwritten contract between academics and society.

In a more practical note, here are three resources to kick things off, that might be useful:

1. It’s worth looking at the eight design aspirations of ASU (https://newamericanuniversity.asu.edu/about/design-aspirations), which map out a framework for socially responsive and beneficial academic research and practice. I find this a very powerful framework for testing whether academic activities are socially useful, or merely self-indulgent.

3. And although it’s academics talking to academics, it’s worth checking out this summary of a meeting at the University of Michigan on Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse – http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mm/